Set Display Time Zone

Storing Dates and Times

Cradle stores all dates and times in UTC, which is most likely not your local time zone.

To ensure that Cradle displays all dates and times using your local time zone, you need to set the ‘Display time zone’ option in Preferences, as shown below. The offset from UTC option is for customers who have users in multiple time zones with a central server. It can be more convenient for everyone to have the same view of times, that of the central server, rather than their local time zone.

We hope that this is helpful!
Cradle Preferences UI Control

Release of Cradle-7.1.2

We are pleased to announce that we released Cradle-7.1.2 last month, with some useful new features and some fixes. We have sent announcement e-mails to all customers with active maintenance, and sent e-mails to the customers whose enhancements that have been added, and whose reported bugs have been fixed.

Some of the new features in this release are:

– Equipments in Physical Architecture Diagrams can be expanded to IDEF0 diagrams, as well as the other diagram types
– Faster processing of baseline operations to retire and reinstate items
– You can specify a date range for the change history entries to be shown in views
– A skill linked to an item type can provide RO access to all items of the type
– The External Command Interface includes new events for schema changes and operations on user profiles

If you upgrade to Cradle-7.1.2 anywhere, you must upgrade everywhere, the server and all clients.

Customers who purchased a single-user Cradle-7.1 product can also apply this new release.

See here https://youtu.be/bgiQQ0N8bV4 for a short summary of Cradle!

Editing Dates in Cradle – A Tip

Editing dates in Cradle can be useful. You may want to change the default date format, or it could be you need to bring a review date forward for selected items. In this article I will explain how you can do this, including tips which may help.

Attributes

Cradle allows attributes to be defined as dates. These dates are stored by default using the format yyyy/mm/dd in the database.  However, you can control how dates are displayed, for example as: dd/mm/yy or as mm/dd/yy. Date fields are displayed with a ‘date chooser‘ that displays a calendar that you can use to change months and select days.

If you enter a date before 2000, such as: 23/09/95 then you cannot enter a year number such as: 07 to mean 2007. Similarly, if you enter a date with a year such as 16, then this will be interpreted to be 2016 and you cannot manually enter a year such as 99 to mean 1999.

Editing Tips

Date picker in Cradle
Date Picker
  • When you select a date field, the day, month and year components of a date can be selected individually
  • The cursor up and cursor down fields can be used to change a day, month or year by one, moving forwards and backwards, and you can move through 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001
  • TAB can be used to move forward through the components of a date field
  • You can press CTRL-TAB to move backwards through the components of a date field
  • You can also use the ‘date chooser’ at any time

The ability to use the cursor keys and TAB and CTRL-TAB may be helpful.

Display Preferences

To set your choice of date display, open the User Preferences -> UI Control  and select in Date and Time Display.

How to select the date display preferences
Date Preferences

The Preferences dialog lets you control settings that are used to customise your WorkBench environment and set default options. For more information you can take a look at this cradle help article.

Article updated 17/09/2018 – Added introduction